Two news items about alternative operating system news in a row? What is this, Christmas? In any case, the Haiku project, the darling of OSNews (hey it's okay now), has released its second alpha release. This new stable development release contains some serious improvements over the first alpha.

I downloaded the new alpha and actually got it installed on a 2GB USB stick. (No need for a separate hard drive to try Haiku.) My jaw dropped when I saw how fast it booted to the desktop!

And then, I was like... Now what?

It seems to me like I was able to get aroud the alpha 1 live CD easier than with alpha 2. Like the subject title says, I might be getting rusty though because it's been a while since I last tried the first alpha release of Haiku.

Find some apps and run them, see if the OS will work for you. Its hard to take off the "I use my computer like this" blinders, people get set in how they compute (look at the windows XP crowd). Just keep in mind that different isn't always unproductive. atm though Haiku is more targeted towards developers and techs, keep in mind... only computer nerds used to work on DOS back in the day

<shameless plug>
If your looking for applications, http://haikufire.com is an alternative to HaikuWare. Everything on HaikuFire is tested and if an application requires external libraries, it's well documented.
</shameless plug>